Huey: $100 million treasure buried – and never found
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Born Arthur Simon Flegenheimer to Jewish immigrants from Germany, in his late teens he became known around the neighborhood by a name you’ve probably heard. Having grown up very poor in the Bronx, starting off with crime as a profession was the only way he could make enough money to support his sickly mother. And although he denied it for years saying that his father had died, his father had actually abandoned them.
Upon reaching the tender age of 17, Arthur had to serve a year and a half for burglary of a local sporting goods store, taking mostly guns. He then continued his life of crime as the leader of a street gang that he and his friend Joey Noe had formed. That’s when he started going by the name of Dutch Schultz among his partners in crime.
Being one of the most notorious New York City gangsters, Dutch hid a box somewhere in the northern part of New York state that contained over 100 million dollars in cash, jewels and gold coins. After making a large fortune through bootlegging and gambling, Schultz was killed in 1935 by freelance assassins hired by an opposing crime family, so the location of the money was lost forever.
Hundreds of acres of land have been plowed under and dug up for decades since his death, especially since there was always somebody who insisted they “know” where it is. Trouble is, theirs was nothing more than rumor and uninformed speculation, and in fact, most of the people who’ve claimed they know where the fortune is, didn’t even know Schultz.
With the start of Prohibition in 1920, New York City was immediately overtaken by guys like Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano. Since booze of any kind was illegal, bootlegging suddenly became an easy way to make a living, so Schultz started a beer manufacturing and distribution business. They regularly sent hoodlums around to terrorize bar owners, their gang demanding that those bar owners buy beer only from them.
The lucrative operation expanded throughout all the boroughs, and even into the classier places like Tribeca and SoHo, where turf wars surfaced with hundreds of members being killed or maimed in the process. Eventually Dutch Schultz turned to underground gambling and became one of the richest men in the country.
In 1933, the death knell sounded for the Schultz empire. Just like Al Capone, he was indicted for income tax evasion by borough prosecutor Thomas Dewey, who later ran for president and “defeated” Harry Truman. Dewey’s main problem in this case was that witnesses feared testifying against Schultz, so in the end he was acquitted.
Dewey continued to go after him, but it wasn’t the law who finally got the gangster. Schultz planned on having hitmen murder Dewey, but since other mafia leaders thought that to be a bad idea, they hired the hitmen to kill Schultz. They made the hit, but he didn’t die from the gunshots, but rather from peritonitis caused by the gunshots.
Schultz had kept his fortune in a heavy-duty safe rather than in banks that failed during The Great Depression, and since this prosecutor wasn’t the type to give up, his newest concern was that Dewey would eventually get him. Just days before Schultz died, he instructed minions to take his loot and head north to the arranged hiding place.
Inside that plastic-sealed metal treasure box were diamonds, rubies, emeralds and gold coins, plus hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and bearer bonds, totaling just over $100 million. For more than a century, fortune hunters have dug up and torn apart the Catskill Mountains in search of the gangster’s long lost fortune, to no avail.
They have pictures and maps that supposedly show exactly where the loot is buried, but no part of the booty has ever been uncovered. No one even knows if the story of Dutch’s buried treasure is real or just a figment of someone’s overactive imagination BUT this one thing is for sure: The guys who took his fortune away and buried it were never seen again. That statement can be taken either way.
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